sceptres, pyramidical or cone-shaped stones, rudely hewn {45}
tree-stumps, are examples which we find in the literature and art of
the historic or prehistoric periods; the most common kind of private
fetich was the gem, carried as an amulet. This superstitious view of
gems belonging to primitive faith has continued through many ages.
Moreover, both in the public and private religion of Christendom in
many periods, and even at the present time, we can easily recognise
the fetichistic value of the sacred objects, relics, crucifixes; and
the Bible itself might sometimes be carried as an amulet about the
person to secure one from danger, and its modern use in the English
legal oath, the witness “kissing the book,” conforms to a fetichistic
type of oath which was common in the primitive Teutonic
communities.[45.1] When Tertullian exclaims, “How great is the
difference between the wood of the cross and the shapeless wooden
emblems of Pallas or Ceres,”[45.2] he is thinking generally {46} of
the wide difference between Christianity and Hellenic polytheism. As
regards the attitude of the Christian and pagan worshippers towards
these emblems of their cult which Tertullian mentions, we are not sure
that any such general distinction could be drawn. The “adoration of
the true wood of the cross,” of which we have heard in recent times,
if we merely consider the nature of the religious object and the value
of the material thing for faith, must be called fetichistic: at least
I know of no other word equally appropriate in the terminology of the
science of religions. Doubtless the modern mind, in the performance of
such ritual practices, can distinguish between the inanimate or
material thing and the divine spirit which sanctifies it. But so also
can the intelligent savage, who cares nothing for his piece of wood
when he thinks the power-giving spirit has departed from it. The
fetichism then of the higher religions and of the savage faith is
morphologically the same; the vital difference lies in {47} the
conception of the divinity that is supposed to animate or sanctify the
material thing.
It would be wrong to attribute the fetichistic proclivities discovered
in the Christian communities wholly to the Hellenic or Mediterranean
strain in our religion; for we must reckon with the survival among the
later ritual-observances of the superstitions of the Northern peoples,
and fetichism was certainly characteristic of the early Teutonic,
Celtic, and Slavonic races. In this matter, as in others, we have to
note that the puritanism of the early Church could not prevail against
the strength of habit and immemorial tradition.
The illustration of this group of affinities may conclude with the
observation that the most cherished emblem of our creed, the type of
the cross itself, had already been in vogue as a religious symbol of
certain of the earlier pagan peoples; it played a part in the ancient
Egyptian[47.1] and {48} Assyrian ritual, and recently Dr Evans has
revealed to us in the Palace of Minos in Crete a chapel of the cross
dedicated to the worship of the divine mother.[48.1] We can go no
further than the surmise that the propagation of Christianity may have
been assisted by the fact that the emblem of the new faith would not
appear wholly unfamiliar to some of the converted races.
As regards the affinities discernible in respect of hieratic
institutions, the organisation of churches, the relations of Church
and State, I have only space to cite a few salient illustrations. The
earliest Christian Church, a private religious society united by the
bond of faith, the members contributing to each other’s wants, with a
simple democratic organisation of ecclesia and sacred officials, would
not strike the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an unfamiliar
phenomenon; for its family likeness {49} to the Hellenic “thiasoi” or
brotherhoods of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often been
commented on. They, like it, were often proselytisers, and, ignoring
the barriers of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle the
religious fellowship of man. “It is well to consider all men friends
and brothers, as being the family of God,” says Apollonius,[49.1]
echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil was ready prepared for
the new cosmopolitan religion.
In considering the history of the hierarchy in Christendom, we are
often obliged to turn our eyes back upon the pre-Christian period. For
instance, the insistence on the apostolic succession in the various
churches, a primary {50} article of faith with many at the present
time, is entirely in keeping with a very old Mediterranean tradition:
for we find it not infrequently maintained in Hellenic paganism that
the priest should descend directly from the god whom he serves, or
from the first apostle who instituted the particular cult or
mystery;[50.1] we hear of the priest being qualified “by descent and
by divine appointment.”[50.2] But in the earlier religious period the
succession or descent was regarded in the linear and physical sense:
this has become refined into the idea of a spiritual succession,
maintained however by a continuity of physical though mystic contact.
Here, as so often in the comparative study of religion, we have to
note {51} the physical and material ideas of the more primitive period
maintaining themselves in the later but translated into a spiritual
significance.
The relation between the priesthood and the State has been one of the
burning questions of the secular and religious history of Europe. To
understand fully all the features in the State organisation of the
Church and the many points of controversy, we need often to go far
back into the records of early Aryan and Mediterranean society. We may
mark here and there in the pagan Anatolian region the emergence of the
idea that the priest should be temporal lord,[51.1] while in most
early Aryan societies the subordination of the spiritual to the
secular power appears to have been maintained. A study of the sagas of
the North suggests the reflection that the struggle fought out to a
definite decision at the Reformation had already been decided in the
{52} Teutonic North in the far-off days before Christianity;[52.1]
also that the secular character of the married English priesthood in
our pre-Conquest period is only the reflex of old Teutonic custom.
The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a question that has agitated
and divided the churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves have
finished with it. To trace its origin and inner significance, a wide
anthropological study is necessary, and I may be able to return to it
in another association in a later lecture. Within the history of the
Church, we may trace back the religious ideas underlying the dogma of
celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of the third and fourth centuries,
and we may be right in connecting it with the growth of Mariolatry.
But the original source of the phenomenon lies far in the background
of our religion; the impulse to religious celibacy had long been
congenial to the temperament of {53} some of the Anatolian races. We
find it powerful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians; and in the
anthropology of primitive societies we are often confronted with the
idea that the virgin body is the only fit organ for the full divine
afflatus.
In another question of administration, in the position of women in
regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing
pre-Christian traditions.[53.1] Their present total exclusion from
sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the
Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all
in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in
fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek
influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be
fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth
century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the
“priestesses {54} of the Virgin Mary.”[54.1] It is still possible
that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.
If we try to give a complete account of any of the important
institutions of the churches, infant baptism or the Roman confession
for instance, we ought at least, before we can pronounce that any
particular one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to survey the
religions contiguous to or immediately preceding Christianity. As
regards the practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope to show,
may be explained as connected with a ritual of purification, its
institution cannot at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon in the
early Church. A very simple form of it appears to have been known to
the Judaic system, and it appears as a formal element in the
Babylonian liturgy:[54.2] as a spiritual relief to which a man might
voluntarily resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic {55}
oracle;[55.1] as part of the cathartic ritual which was preliminary
to initiation it was required by the ordinances of the Samothracian
Mysteries; and it is in an anecdote concerning these that we meet with
the first example of the free Protestant spirit reprobating the
practice.[55.2] We may infer that it was uncongenial to the character
and alien to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, in the record
of whose pagan institutions there is no hint of it, and Alcuin
complains of his Goths “that no one of the laity was willing to
confess to the priests.”[55.3] It may well have been a spontaneous
growth of southern Christianity; but it appears to have arisen first
within the early monastic orders,[55.4] and {56} as these in their
origin had certain affinities with the non-Christian mystic
brotherhoods, where the practice was not unknown, it is possible that
in this matter also a pre-Christian tradition was still of some
effect. Or, if this is unlikely, we must maintain that like conditions
evolve similar products over the whole area with which comparative
religion deals; and the most striking resemblance to a Christian
confessional is to be observed in the old Mexican ritual, if we can
trust Sahagun.[56.1] As regards the other suggested example, we
should probably find, if we followed out the history and origin of
infant baptism, that the pre-Christian tradition was a strong
efficient force in the settlement of the question; there were urgent
reasons at least why the rite should soon have come to be maintained
by the early Church, for analogous rites whereby the new-born child
was consecrated to the divinity were probably part of the hereditary
tradition of most of the converted races. {57} We know that many of
the Hellenes had been in the habit of passing the infant solemnly
round the fire, a purificatory and also consecrating process;[57.1]
the northern Teutons sprinkled the infant with water:[57.2] and when
Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian tribes were in the habit
of plunging the new-born into river-water, to harden the little ones,
he is mistaking a religious for a secular practice.[57.3] Looking at
the baptism of the adult neophyte, we find interesting resemblances to
the ceremonies of the pre-Christian mystic initiations; the idea
commonly expressed in these latter, that the catechumen died to his
old life and was born again, was eagerly adopted and developed by the
later religion, and here as there left its imprint on the ritual:
death and rebirth were actually simulated in the mystic
service.[57.4]
{58}
The affinities between Christian and pagan ritual, in many cases no
doubt the result of direct inheritance, demand a more detailed
investigation than they have yet received, especially in respect of
the festival calendar: even the early writers of the Church were of
opinion that the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary in
February, was a development of the old Roman Februalia instituted by
Numa;[58.1] and such names of Christian saints and bishops as
Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the popularity of the Hilaria, the festival
of Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much might be still discovered
by a minute knowledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined with travel
in Mediterranean lands and with personal observation of the ritual of
feast- and fast-days in the remoter villages.[58.2]
{59}
Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity
than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and
pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To
point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it
is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the
latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must
guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof
of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may
be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of
thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical
insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been
followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to
call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in
human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and
half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to
{60} mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a
personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God
was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination;
and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric
of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher
stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it
has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the
King.
More important still for the purposes of the religious comparison is
the wide prevalence in the Mediterranean communities of the belief in
the death and resurrection of the divinity: and this has been the
theme of much recent anthropological investigation.[60.1] This is not
{61} the time to examine into its origin and significance or to track
out the various phenomena that illustrate and group themselves around
it in the Mediterranean cults. I would merely call attention in
passing to the fact that the belief existed, and was probably
expressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St Paul’s own city of
Tarsos,[61.1] and that it was especially strong in the Attis
Mysteries of the Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete; we know that these
were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our
Lenten period and the beginning of Easter, that they were preceded by
fasting and began with lamentations, {62} the votaries gathering in
sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the
resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic
brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing,
the Hilaria.[62.1] The Christian fathers themselves were struck with
the deep resemblance between this and their own mystery, and they were
tempted to attribute it to the diabolic spirit of parody. We may take
the words of Firmicus Maternus,[62.2] with which he concludes his
description of such an Attis Mystery as I have outlined--“truly the
devil has Christians of his own”--as the text of a very important
chapter in comparative religion. We hear of a Christian convert in
Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the Hilaria; and Phrygia,
its ancestral home, was one of the earliest strongholds of
Christianity. Here at least we may assume that the {63} ancient dogma
and ritual of the people was one of the predisposing causes operating
in favour of the new.
The comparative student must also give careful consideration to what
are called the eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning
posthumous happiness, salvation, and damnation, not only of the
Judaic, but also of the Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian religions:
and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was they that were
most widely known in the area of the Greco-Roman world, and modern
theory has at times endeavoured to trace back the apocalyptic
literature of Christianity to Hellenic sources.[63.1] The
investigation would demand a careful study of the Eleusinian and the
Orphic Mysteries, in both of which we find the pregnant idea that
salvation after death depended {64} on a religious act of faith or on
a mystic communion with a divinity that might be attained on earth by
a sacrament or other liturgical means: and the inquiry will include
the question how far in these earlier systems the doctrine of
salvation by faith was actually blended with any admixture of the
ethical doctrine of salvation by works. And the problem, like many
others in the scientific study of religion, will be found to concern
philosophic as well as religious history.
The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Mediterranean world have long
been recognised as a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative
science; and both the lower and the higher anthropology can contribute
much that is essential to the full understanding of the evolution of
the Christian doctrine concerning the divine sacrifice and the Holy
Communion. I need not here enlarge on this subject, even by way of
mere illustration, for I have already dealt with it, however
inadequately, {65} in a former paper:[65.1] it is an intricate and
fascinating theme and invites further research.
But for proving the revival on the new Christian soil of the older
pre-Christian religious thought and aspiration, there is no special
subject so fruitful as the study of Mariolatry. I have already
suggested by way of illustration the possibility of such pagan titles
as “Kore-Parthenos,” the “Gods’ mother,” having exercised an abiding
influence in exciting and shaping the nascent thought of earlier
Christendom; and I affirmed that their prevalence corresponded to a
prevailing religious bias which turned the minds of many of the
peoples in the old world to cleave affectionately to the
mother-goddess or to the divine maid. Apart from mere titles, the
student of the latter days of paganism is forced to note at almost
every point the deep impress of such ideas and the enthusiasm they
evoked. In all the leading Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid
{66} held a dominant position, and the Orphic brotherhoods had ranged
the Mother by the side of the Son-God and the Father-God; and even in
the state-cults of the ancient centres of Hellenic civilisation, the
maternal character of the divine power had long been cherished.
Finally, the Phrygian religion of the Mother, to which even Mithraism,
a pre-eminently masculine or paternal religion, was obliged to
accommodate itself, had captured the greater part of the Greco-Roman
world; and was certainly very influential in the districts of Asia
Minor visited by St Paul and in every one of the cities of the Seven
Churches. The sentiment it evoked is expressed by the words of a poet
of the Middle Attic comedy: “For those who have true knowledge of
things divine, there is nothing greater than the Mother; hence the
first man who became civilised founded the shrine of the
Mother.”[66.1] This then is a leading factor in the religious
psychology of the converted nations with which we must reckon.
{67}
We cannot, in accordance with the laws of human nature, suppose that a
religious tradition of such hereditary power as this could wholly lose
its force under a changed creed. The gaps in the record will probably
make it impossible to supply a detailed and geographical statement
showing how in the various communities of the ancient cult the
personality of the pre-Christian goddess was fused gradually with the
ideal image of the Virgin-Mother of Christ. Only a few suggestive
facts in the development and organisation of Mariolatry may be
mentioned here. The heretic Montanists of Phrygia were charged with
deifying the Virgin and believing that one of their leaders was united
in a mystic marriage with her, a belief natural to Phrygian paganism;
and their founder Montanus is said to have originally been a priest of
Cybele.[67.1] The mother of Constantine, the {68} Empress Helena, who
is supposed to have been of Bithynian origin, was praised for decking
the grotto of Bethlehem with sacred gifts as the shrine of the
Virgin;[68.1] it is noteworthy that her earliest recorded chapel
should be a grotto or cave; for it was in such underground shrines
that the Phrygian Mother was commonly worshipped in her own land.
Another striking analogy to the ancient ritual of the mother-goddess
is presented by the feast called the κοίμησις and ἀνάληψις τῆς
θεοτόκου, first mentioned by Andreas of Crete (_circ._ 650 A.D.), but
probably in existence long before his time: the Mother of God dies and
rises again in the Assumption. It would be of special interest if we
could discover that this ritual first became canonical in Crete, the
home of Andreas; for in Crete as in Cyprus, where the Virgin succeeded
to the name of Aphrodite, we have traces of a similar rite in which
the goddess Aphrodite was laid out {69} as dead on a bier and was
afterwards raised to life.[69.1]
And is it nothing more than a coincidence that in the same city of
Ephesus, where during St Paul’s visit the fanatics raised a tumult in
behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six centuries later the people
with equal ecstasy hailed the decision of the Synod that proclaimed
the Virgin-Mother of God (θεοτόκος)? The mention of Ephesus suggests
another consideration of the greatest importance for the study of the
development and propagation of the Christian dogma concerning the
virginity of the Mother of God. The Virgin-birth, an idea which has
long been a stumbling-block to science, and which has recently been
pronounced by some to be unessential to Christianity, was a dogma that
could easily be understood and even eagerly accepted by the converts
of Anatolia[69.2] and the {70} Greek world. In Ephesus itself the
ancient goddess had been imagined in some sense as a maternal or
generative divinity, yet also as a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted
partly by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of austerity and
chastity was enforced.[70.1] The great Phrygian Mother was herself,
according to a native legend, miraculously conceived, and there are
grounds for suggesting that she was occasionally regarded as a
virgin.[70.2] The evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the
pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, and often
contradictory, with no power apparently in themselves to develop a
fixed dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreasonable to maintain
that the Christian doctrines concerning the Virgin-Mother could have
been evoked merely by the spontaneous demand of the Anatolian or Greek
converts. But we may affirm that when that doctrine was {71} presented
to them, their own traditions had prepared their imaginations to
receive it as congenial. We meet in the late pagan literature passages
in praise of virginity as a divine quality quite as ecstatic and
extravagant as many in the Christian fathers.[71.1] Many of the
nations had long cherished the ideal of a virgin goddess; most had
been devotees of the Divine Mother. The successful propagation of
Christianity may have owed much to the means which it possessed for
satisfying these two sentiments and for reconciling them in a primary
article of faith. Then, we must certainly ascribe the exaltation of
Mary in the Church of the first six centuries to the enthusiasm
engendered by the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may have
contributed much more than we have already noted; and more than one
writer has explored the deep indebtedness of the developed Mariolatry
to the older figure of {72} Isis.[72.1] The extravagance of an
enthusiasm that was rooted in old pagan sentiment occasionally
engendered heresies. Besides the records concerning the Montanist, of
which the significance has already been noticed, most interesting and
valuable for our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius against the
heresy of the Collideriani,[72.2] wild women who devoted themselves
to the worship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he describes and
reprobates: in their processions they appear to have drawn the Virgin
round in a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised a sacrament
with bread: and he adds that they came from Thrace, the immemorial
home of fanatic women and of the goddess “Artemis the Queen,” to whom
also offerings of corn were made.[72.3] The procession of a goddess
in a car was probably part of an old Thrako-Phrygian {73} ceremonial,
and we hear of a sacramental eating of bread in the service of Cybele.
We may finally note that the enthusiastic literature devoted to the
pre-Christian Divine Mother and Maid and to the Virgin-Mother of God
is the same in quality and tone. The prayer addressed to Isis in the
story of Apuleius reminds us of a Christian hymn of praise; and the
older liturgical or literary expressions would naturally colour the
later.[73.1]